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There probably isn’t a single person in existence who’s actually happy with the current state of cycling in the U.S. If you’re pro-cycling, you hate how dangerous it is to ride your bike anywhere and how strong the opposition is to anything that would make riding safer. If you’re anti-cycling, the fact that bikes are even legal to ride on public roads in the first place offends you to your core. But while you might assume their unhappiness is the only thing those two sides share, they also have a common enemy: a now-deceased cycling-obsessed weirdo named John Forester.
And when I say Forester was a weirdo, I truly mean it. The man didn’t just love riding his bike. No, that would be too normal. In Forester’s mind, there was only one way to be a proper cyclist, and that was by being the kind of stereotypical, aggressive rider that so many people love to hate. Want to ride a comfortable bike to the store in regular clothes? That’s wrong, and you aren’t a real cyclist. Prefer mountain bikes over road bikes? That’s wrong, and you aren’t a real cyclist. Want a front suspension and straight handlebars? You guessed it — wrong and not a real cyclist.
These days, obsessive weirdos like Forester are usually found in enthusiast forums, where they write long-winded rants about how a proper timepiece must be hand-assembled from start to finish, berating another user for daring to buy a pair of boots that use a fiberboard lasting board, or extolling the virtues of the RCA Type 44. But since the internet didn’t exist back then, Forester instead went about giving local governments all the wrong ideas on cycling policy and setting bicycle safety back decades. And if you’ve never heard his name before, you’re in luck, because Not Just Bikes just dedicated a full 95-minute video to how wrong John Forester was about everything.
John Forester was wrong about cycling
If it hadn’t been for Forester, there’s a good chance the resurgence of cycling in the 1960s and ’70s would have led cities and towns to adopt a more European-style approach to bike safety. Back in 1972, UCLA published Bikeway Planning Criteria and Guidelines, a document outlining research-backed proposals for how California’s cities should design bicycle infrastructure, and if its recommendations had been implemented, U.S. cities would probably look wildly different. John Forester, however, fought to stop it.
But by recognizing that it’s dangerous to put small, slow-moving vehicles in the middle of a bunch of big, fast-moving vehicles, the UCLA engineering department caused a major freak-out among the hardcore cyclists already riding on California’s streets, which included John Forester. They liked riding in the road and thought separate bike lanes were the first step toward banning bikes altogether. Also, anyone who was too scared to ride in traffic was simply a coward and not a real cyclist. The way they saw it, separate infrastructure turned cyclists into second-class citizens.
The problem, of course, was that the research available at the time already supported UCLA’s recommendations, but Forester wasn’t going to let that stop him. Instead, he wrote the book Effective Cycling, where he simply told readers the research was on his side, while also misrepresenting studies and going on long-winded rants. And when researchers published newer studies that also showed Forester was wrong, he pretended they didn’t exist. And yet, despite telling himself he was fighting for cyclists and their rights, what he really accomplished was making the U.S. more dangerous for anyone on a bike, while also making drivers even more hostile toward cyclists. Great job, dude.